Christopher Owens wilts at Wilshire Ebell show

Main set: Lysandre's Theme / Here We Go / New York City / A Broken Heart / Here We Go Again / Riviera Rock / Love Is in the Ear of the Listener / Lysandre / Everywhere You Knew / Closing Theme / Part of Me (Lysandre's Epilogue)

You go to enough concerts, you're bound to attend shows where the venue becomes part of the story: The Who performing Tommy at the Metropolitan Opera, Springsteen bringing his Seeger Sessions group to the first New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival after Hurricane Katrina, Belle and Sebastian at the Bowl.

The Wilshire Ebell Theatre is a lovely room, airy and intimate. But with its high ceilings, sepia color scheme, formal proscenium and tightly spaced, gently raked orchestra, it can feel like the auditorium at a well-heeled suburban high school. Unfortunately, former Girls frontman Christopher Owens’ performance would have fit right in at a well-heeled suburban high school’s talent night.

To soften the blow a bit, he would certainly be a talented (if overly sensitive) student; the brooding, troubled kid who writes poetry. Lysandre (Fat Possum/ Turnstile), his first album recorded under his own name, displays ambition, but it’s a distinctly lowercase ambition. Yes, it's a “concept” album – another example of the pleasingly counterintuitive trend of musicians returning to long forms in the era of Twitter and Vine – but it’s a slight, underfed concept.

Barely a half-hour long, the autobiographical storyline can be reduced to: Boy meets Girls. Boy meets girl. Boy breaks up with band and girl. Boy writes slight, underfed concept album about it.

Owens has claimed in interviews that he wrote the entire album in a single day, a feat that becomes less impressive when the songs sound like it. There’s no doubt to his sincerity: When he sings “What if I’m a bad songwriter?” in the hangdog “Love Is in the Ear of the Listener,” he’s so unguarded and ready to lean into the punch, you want to pull him aside and tell him, “No, you can write, but a little editing and a second draft never hurt anyone.”

Then there’s the “theme,” a descending, minor-key motif. Over the course of the set, it’s passed around the band like a new baby at a family reunion. When it’s played on flute and acoustic guitar, it sounds like hippie-ish prog/folk along the lines of It’s a Beautiful Day's first album. On sax, it takes on the annoying quality of Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street,” while the keyboards take it into Fleetwood Mac or Christopher Cross territory.

Owens presents the album from start to finish, unadorned; the band walks on stage, settles into position and starts. The only decoration is a vase filled with long-stemmed white roses, distributed to the audience at the end of the nearly hour-long performance. He doesn’t say a word to the polite audience (who took up only about one-third of the theater’s 900-seat orchestra section). No explanations, not even an ironically shouted “Los Angeles!” He doesn’t even bother to introduce his six-piece ensemble. Owens himself is so self-effacing, it’s impossible to tell if this is timidity or arrogance: Is he nervous or does he believe that any extraneous words will diminish his creation?

The music points toward timidity. He sings in a feathery whisper that has touches of Paul Simon and Elliott Smith, even as it disperses like a dandelion. The band is equally self-effacing; two backing singers nervously sway to the songs, thin and pretty, with a fashion sense copied by Marnie on Girls. Using the HBO show as a reference here might be a cheap shot, but it’s also the closest this evening came to his former group.

Owens has shed Girls’ knock-kneed jangle for the more lugubrious singer-songwriter stylings of the '70s, yet it comes off as the work of a man who has studied the crystalline productions of Richard Perry and Roy Hallee and learned all the wrong lessons. What little heat is felt comes from the friction between the 20th century studio perfection of his sources and Owens’ contemporary Pro Tools point-and-shoot spontaneity. But that's not something he seems interested in exploring.

The instrumental “Riviera Rock,” for isntance, takes the idea of “yacht rock” a little too literally; it sounds like something you might have heard on the Lido Deck of the Love Boat, tasteful but bland. And the most “rock” number of the night, “New York City,” was almost laughably feckless, pushed forward by a saxophone so bumptiously overdone it came off like a drunk photo-bombing the song.

The best song of the set was the last: “(Part Of Me) Lysandre’s Epilogue” matches a billowy, night highway melody with a lovely chromatic harmonica fill reminiscent of the great records Jimmy Webb made with Glen Campbell. Then he returned for an encore of covers that showcased his best (and worst) instincts.

It’s no mean trick to make Cat Stevens sound macho, but compared to Owens’ weary and agoraphobic take on “Wild World,” the original might as well have been by Metallica. Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” was a better choice; he already had the harmonica and flute available and it’s the song that best suits his voice. The gentle plea of “Let It Be Me,” made famous by the Everly Brothers, was also in his wheelhouse, making smart use of his harmony singers.

But Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” was completely beyond him. It’s one of the nastiest songs in the bard’s catalog, a brutal kiss-off that hits even harder due to Dylan’s understated performance. Owens was understated, yet lacked any edge. It's the song as seen from the person being abandoned, going over it, searching for something redeeming in the goodbye.

It was so wrong that it was fascinating, if only forensically. When the supporting singers chimed in, turning it into a singalong, it became something you might hear at a sleepaway camp hootenanny. Or a well-heeled, suburban high school’s talent show.

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